The ones that nearly got away: Last Exit, Iron Path

John Zorn’s Naked City set me on an expedition to find as many degrees of separation from the band as I could. Tower Records published a magazine that one year included a supplement about a festival in New York City spotlighting the downtown New York scene.

From there, I learned about Robin Holcomb, Elliott Sharp, Bobby Previte, Marc Ribot — too many names to explore and not enough cash to get them all. And the Honolulu stores wouldn’t have carried these esoteric albums anyway.

When I learned about Last Exit, I thought, “Will this band give me a fix till whenever Naked City make a new album?” All that I read about the band — guitarist Sonny Sharrock, drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, saxophone player Peter Brötzman and bassist Bill Laswell — led me to believe that they would rock you the fuck out much like Naked City did.

So I picked up a cassette of Iron Path, the only studio album the quartet would record and the only album released by a major label. I might have played through it a few times, but Iron Path lacked the thing that my unsophisticated teenage ears required — hooks.

For all its chaos, Naked City was a pretty melodic band. That’s not the case with Last Exit. These guys are intense, and they can bring on a mighty mean noise that never flies completely into anarchy. But hummable, they are not.

Iron Path didn’t survive one of the regular purges I made to fund other music. That would have been some time in the early ’90s.

The next time I encountered Iron Path was in 2003. A customer at Waterloo Records asked me whether the store carried it. I had actually heard of the album, which surprised both of us.

I wouldn’t think about Iron Path till recently, when I ran across an album titled Strange Meeting by a band called Power Tools. This trio consisted of Bill Frisell, Melvin Gibbs and Ronald Shannon Jackson. I had never heard of Power Tools, and seeing Jackson’s name in the credits reminded me of Last Exit.

Many, many months later, I would find a sealed copy of Iron Path on vinyl for what could be considered an obscene bargain. Of course, I snatched it.

The problem with precocity is sometimes premature development can be mistakenly conflated with complete development. Yes, I was the audience for an album like Iron Path, but no, not at the age of 17. 29, perhaps. 35, maybe. But not 17.

The album is playing on the turntable as I write this sentence, and I’m enjoying the hell out of it — far, far more than I did approximately a quarter of a century ago. I wanted the wrong thing out of Iron Path the first time around, and I wrongly let it go.

It’s back in my life again, and it’s a pity that it can’t be in yours without a hefty outlay of cash. Used copies for the CD go for exorbitant prices, and the streaming services don’t have it. That pretty much leaves us with YouTube.